Pinterest working to get more men onboard

Updated 7:32 pm, Sunday, August 17, 2014

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Pinterest, with a user base that is 80 percent female, has ramped up efforts to market directly to potential male users. New users who visit Pinterest are greeted with several images highlighting male users.

Pinterest, with a user base that is 80 percent female, has ramped up efforts to market directly to potential male users. New users who visit Pinterest are greeted with several images highlighting male users.

Photo: Brown, Kristen

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Pinterest working to get more men onboard

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Alex Chrisman's Pinterest boards are filled with Jeep Wranglers and fancy pocket knives. There's even one Pin board for which the unifying theme appears to be attractive women.

On Pinterest, Chrisman, a 30-year-old San Francisco man, is a rare breed.

Though the digital scrapbooking site is a startup superstar with a $5 billion valuation, it has struggled to attract men.

A recent study by RJMetrics found that men make up 20 percent of Pinterest's user base, and do only 8 percent of the pinning.

As Pinterest has worked to expand its reach and become more than simply collections of virtual scrapbooks, it has tried to attract more male users like Chrisman. It is unclear, though, whether those efforts can change a brand identity that is widely viewed as feminine, from the company's curvaceous logo font to its flowery content.

"If they just try to shove pins down men's throats, fundamentally that is not going to work to attract men," said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "Pinterest as it is just doesn't appeal to them."

Boosting pool of users

Pinterest has proved that a tech startup can be a runaway success courting an audience that is primarily women. But by doubling its potential pool of users, Pinterest could dramatically increase its attractiveness to advertisers, who pay to promote their brands on the site.

Recently, Pinterest has made an effort to market directly to potential male users, prominently showcasing men in marketing materials. New users who visit Pinterest are greeted with images of male users. "He used Pinterest to find his stride," reads one promotion showing a man running. Another shows a man perusing a record collection.

The company recently hired David Rubin as its first head of brand. He is a former vice president of marketing at Unilever, where he handled the ultra-macho Axe body care campaigns.

And it has continued to expand beyond the site's core "scrapbooking" feature that earned it its girlish reputation. It introduced "Place Pins" that allow users to pin places they would like to go on a map - a gender-neutral play for travelers. Its new image-searching tool is designed to make Pinterest a destination for discovery as well as collection.

But Blau said Pinterest will probably have to make larger, more fundamental changes if it wants to really go after a male demographic.

"For starters, the look and feel of the site, the color scheme - it's cutesy," he said. "It feels feminine."

That carries over to the brand's identity - the highlight of the party introducing its Guided Search feature were craft stations, which let guests practice Pinterest's specific brand of do-it-yourself domesticity by infusing their own olive oil, among other activities.

Interests differ

In studying how different groups use Pinterest, Loren Terveen, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Minnesota, found that it's not necessarily the content of the site that is keeping away male users. He found male Pinners were more interested in topics such as photography, art, design and home decor than the more traditionally masculine categories of sports, technology and cars.

But his more recent, unpublished work has also shown that many men who do sign up find little incentive to stick around, due in part to the lack of male users. With so few men on the site, once a male user follows a few female friends, his feed could become dominated by, well, cupcakes, boots and shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal.

Other social clipboard sites have tried to capitalize on Pinterest's perceived femininity by starting similar male-oriented operations such as Gentlemint, Manteresting, and Dudepins.

"Men may use Pinterest less than women primarily because a majority of men don't scrapbook, or collect," said Kamil Szybalski, a founder of Dudepins. "They look, share and buy."

'Male anxiety'

Despite their more masculine appeal, though, none of those sites has found the level of success that Pinterest has.

There is "male anxiety about Pinterest and the extent to which it is perceived as a site for women," Terveen said. "If Pinterest wants to expand to attract more men, they need to think about how can they change the perception that's out there."

To really attract men, Blau said, Pinterest would probably need a "full rebranding." Then again, he said, he's not sure Pinterest really needs the men. Most third-party estimates peg Pinterest's monthly active users at around 40 million - and those are users with incredible buying power on a platform that often functions like an online shopping catalog. And if Pinterest were to lure a bunch of male users, there's a risk it would change the very dynamic that has attracted so many women.

Shifting demographic

When Chrisman started using Pinterest, he said, he often bookmarked content from around the Web to his Pinterest boards, but never spent time browsing the streams of content on Pinterest itself. It was just too girly.

But now he spends a fair amount of time browsing content on the site, since he has found others who share his interests (surfing, men's fashion, cars). And the search function, he said, has given him a whole new use for the site entirely.

"It seems like that demographic is starting to shift a little, maybe," he said. "Guys just don't realize what's on there."

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